Published in Mobiles

Apple slammed for sexist design

by on17 September 2018


To be fair,  Donald Trump also has the same problem

Apple has been slammed for creating phones which are too large to fit in the average woman or US president's hand.

The iPhone XS Max, its largest, most expensive and pointless model yet, has a 6.5” screen size, an inch larger than the iPhone 8 Plus, which came out last year.

However, campaigners have argued that the company’s latest product - and several of its predecessors - ignore the needs of its female consumers and the US president, whose hands are on average an inch shorter in width than the average male.

Feminist activist Caroline Criado-Perez, who led the campaign to put a statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, argued that the majority of Apple’s phones do not accommodate women’s smaller hands.

“Apple has once again failed to update the only phone it makes that fits the average woman’s hand size”, she wrote on Twitter.

Others have weighed in on the debate on social media, with Women’s Equality Party leader Sophie Walker tweeting: “To the boys at Apple, we know you are all obsessed with size. But performance matters too."

In addition to the iPhone XS Max, Apple unveiled two further models with screen sizes of 5.8” and 6.1”.

Criado-Perez, who developed a repetitive strain injury from using an iPhone with a 5.5” screen said that she was not saying "Apple is being evil and deliberately setting out to design phones that injure women by being too big for the average female hand. They are simply part of an industry - and a world - that consistently fails to remember that women are 50 per cent of the population. From medication only tested on male bodies, to iPhones that forget to include a period tracker, it’s entirely usual to forget to design for women. But that doesn’t mean it’s ok.”

She described it as “extremely odd” if the company isn't taking its female consumers into consideration when designing new handsets given that research has shown that women actually buy more iPhones than men, which is odd because I thought women were cleverer than men.

 

 

Last modified on 17 September 2018
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